Deeper in the Cave

The target memory is real, but may not be the actual trauma.

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I was a philosophy nerd in college. Four years of ancient Greek and Latin, which has been directly useful roughly twice since. Who cares.

While both are technically dead languages, the time I spent studying and translating them did something I wouldn’t trade for the world (besides making me pretentious and “uppity,” which makes me insufferable at most parties). The time I spent with those texts and worlds fundamentally populated my symbolic consciousness. They gave me furniture to think with. Dynamics to measure and calculate. Physics. Suffering. Death. And life.

When you spend that long translating, you lose the ability to believe that words are containers you pour meaning into. Translation makes it impossible. You sit with one sentence for an hour and find that the word you want doesn’t exist in English, not because English is impoverished but because the world that made the Greek word sayable is gone. What you’re translating is never really vocabulary. It’s a set of conditions. I came out of those four years with far more reverence for language than I went in with, and a permanent suspicion of anyone who treats a word as a container.

Julia Kristeva named something inside this in a way I’ve never stopped using. She distinguishes the symbolic, the ordered shared system of syntax and reference, the part of language you can look up, from the semiotic: rhythm, cadence, breath, the bodily pulse within a sentence that doesn’t reduce neatly to what its words denote. Her argument is that poetry is one place the second one breaks through and unsettles the first. If you have ever felt what a client meant in their tempo a full sentence before you understood their words, you already know the distinction. She just gave it a name.

And that’s the case for old ideas generally, as far as I’m concerned. Not that they’re old, which confers exactly nothing. It’s that a small handful of them have gone on being useful for two thousand years across wildly different worlds, and that’s a real result. Most ideas don’t survive a decade.

So here’s one that stayed with me, and it plowed through my consultant brain in the middle of a consultation session this past week.

Y’all remember Plato? While problematic in some ways that could be discussed at length, Plato is one of those figures whose fingerprints are all over Western thought. Whether or not he deserves quite as much credit as history has given him, he stands out as someone who helped shape the questions we have spent more than two thousand years trying to answer: What is real? How do we know what we know? What happens when what we can see is only part of what is actually happening?

And that last question is where I want to spend some time. Because Plato gave us an image for it. The cave.

Plato asks you to imagine people who have been chained in a cave since childhood. Chained so they can only face one wall (hold your head still for a second and let the edges of the room go; that). Behind them, up a rise, a fire burns; and between the fire and the prisoners there’s a walkway where figures pass carrying objects. The prisoners can’t see the fire, the walkway, the figures, or the objects. What they can see are shadows thrown on the wall in front of them. They hear echoes and assume the shadows are speaking.

That’s their whole world, and they’re not being stupid about it. Given what they can see, the shadows are a perfectly reasonable account of reality. They have names for them. They get skilled at predicting which one comes next. Plato says they’d give prizes to whoever was best at it.

Then one of them gets unchained and made to turn around. And here’s the part that I’ve been haunted by most this week: turning around hurts. The fire is unbelievably bright and existentially terrifying. Everything is blurry and confusing, and Plato is explicit that the freed prisoner would believe the shadows were truer than the things now in front of them. Given the choice, they’d turn back.

This scene and its dynamics poured into my mind this week in a consultation group, when a clinician described what it feels like to work within the therapeutic relationship with presencing; to be truly vulnerable and transparent in the intersubjective encounter of the therapeutic third. She said it was like going into a cave. And she made a distinction I’ve been thinking about ever since: there’s going in with a flashlight beamed in one direction, moving forward, looking for the next thing; and there’s going in and just being in the space, trying to work out what it’s made of. She said the second one made her curious. She also said, in the same breath, that it made her scared.

I want to spend this essay on that, because I think Plato’s allegory says something exact about our culture as therapists, what we do as EMDR therapists, and what can happen when we choose a target. And I want to be honest that I’m going to end up disagreeing with Plato about almost everything, which is more fun to me than just agreeing with him (again, I’m aware of how pretentious this sounds…but hang with me).

The shadows are real

Let’s be careful right at the start, because the cheap version of this argument is available and I don’t want it.

The cheap version says traditional EMDR looks at shadows and relational work sees reality. That’s rhetorically satisfying and intellectually lazy, and it makes the target memory sound unreal. It isn’t. The shadow is real. The prisoner really sees it. The SUD is real. The memory really hurts, and it hurts in a body, on a Tuesday, in a chair in your office.

More than that: SUD-based history taking is genuinely good at what it does. It gives you a shared object. It converts a diffuse, overwhelming, hard-to-name suffering into something a client can point at, rate, and watch move. That conversion is not a small clinical gift. For a lot of people it’s the first time their pain has held still long enough to be looked at. And a target that moves from an eight to a two teaches a nervous system something it did not previously believe: this can change.

I would not hand any of that back. What follows isn’t a case against the flashlight. It’s a question about what the flashlight is pointed at, and why.

What’s easiest to point at

Here’s the sentence I keep circling, and it’s the one I’d want you to take with you if you take nothing else.

We have mistaken what is easiest to operationalize for what is most explanatory.

The last essay in this series made the case that we assess in a currency we didn’t mint; that our sense of what counts as clinically relevant was issued to us, tested until it felt like competence, and then forgotten as an issue because we’d internalized it and now perceive it as our own intuition. This is that argument arriving at the thing it most affects.

Because look at what our currency can price. A discrete event. A visual image. A negative cognition from a list. A number between zero and ten. A location in the body. All of those are countable, teachable, trainable, and rateable, and every one of them belongs to the wall of Plato’s cave. They’re what shows up when the light is aimed straight ahead.

Now try to price the other thing. A family in which anger had a particular meaning. A developing nervous system learning what proximity costs. A social world teaching which parts of a person had to stay hidden for connection to continue. Thousands of microexperiences of misattunement, some repaired and most not. There’s no number for any of that. There’s no line on the intake form. And often there isn’t even a shared language for how to capture it, much less explore it. So it doesn’t get targeted; not because anyone was careless, but because it never reaches the scale or the observation floor. The shadow gets chosen because the shadow is denominated in the currency we were handed; it’s what we were taught to look for, measure, weigh, and “work on”.

Turn around

But let’s try turning around.

Behind “Dad screamed at me” is not, first of all, an earlier memory of Dad screaming. Behind it is an entire relational world. A child whose attachment system depends on the person frightening them. A household with rules about whose distress was allowed to take up room. A learning, running for years underneath language, about what closeness costs and what has to be given up to keep it.

Trauma is not devastating simply because something bad happened. Its meaning emerges inside a relational ecology. The event casts the shadow; the relational world determines its shape.

This is why I’ve come to think that every negative cognition is a storybook of relationships. Look at any of them on the standard list. I am powerless. I am not good enough. I cannot trust anyone. It was my fault. These are not conclusions a person draws from one event. They can’t be. A statement that global, about the whole self, requires thousands of confirmations before a nervous system will accept it as simply true. One experience of powerlessness produces a memory of being powerless. I am powerless requires a world.

Which means the negative cognition has been telling us this the whole time. We just read it as a label to install against, rather than as a summary of a relational history.

Going deeper is not the same as turning around

Here is where I think the cave becomes a really special and dense focal point, because it exposes something about a move most of us were taught to trust.

When a target won’t move, we’re trained to go back. Float back. Find the earlier one, and the one before that, and the feeder memory beneath that. And the assumption underneath the technique is that depth is chronological; that if we keep going back far enough, we’ll arrive at what’s really underneath (shout out to touchstone memory seekers).

But chronology isn’t depth. You can travel all the way back to age three and still never turn around.

The earlier memory can give us chronological depth. What I’m after here is organizational depth: the relational conditions that taught a nervous system how to interpret what happened.

You’ll have found the earliest shadow. That’s genuinely useful information and I’m not throwing it away. But the earliest instance of I’m not safe is still an instance. It’s still on the wall. The clinically richer question isn’t which shadow came first; it’s how safety, recognition, dependence, shame, and belonging got organized, repeatedly, inside relationships, such that this shadow means what it means.

Going further into the cave and turning around inside it are two different motions. Our training is very good at the first one.

Where I break with Plato

Two places, and both matter.

The first is what happens after the turn. In Plato, the freed prisoner is dragged up a rough ascent, out of the cave, into sunlight, and eventually looks at the sun itself. They come back down knowing what’s real, and everyone else is still watching shadows. That structure gives you somebody who has escaped, and it makes the therapist that somebody.

I don’t believe there’s an outside. There’s no vantage from which a clinician surveys a client’s relational world and announces its true meaning; we established as much in the last essay, and it holds here. What’s actually available is stranger and better: two people, inside the same cave, investigating together the conditions under which these meanings became possible. The therapist isn’t returning from the sun. The therapist is a second person in the dark who is willing to look at what the other one has always had their back to.

The second break is bigger, and it’s the reason I chose this metaphor rather than a friendlier one.

Plato’s larger architecture privileges the abstract and intelligible over the particular, embodied, sensible world. The world we can touch and inhabit sits lower in the hierarchy; what can be grasped beyond it is treated as more fully real. That hierarchy is the ancestor of the demotion this publication keeps arguing against, the one that puts mechanism in the primary tier and the felt relational texture in the secondary. So I’m knowingly borrowing one of the most anti-relational metaphors in Western philosophy to make a relational argument, and the borrowing only works if we invert it.

Because in the version I’m describing, the fire is not a lesser light on the way to a truer one. The fire is the relational world, and it was throwing everything on that wall the entire time. There’s no sun. There’s just what’s been casting it, finally in view.

And the motion isn’t up and out. It’s the one that the clinician in my consultation group named: down, and in, to stay.

What this looks like in a room

Let me make it concrete, with the example I’ve probably used more than any other because of how sadly frequent it is, and how tragically misunderstood those who survive it are. Also, this is a triggering image so pause here if you’d like.

Someone is assaulted. They come to therapy, and the assault is the target, which is correct and obvious and where anyone would start. When we’re ready, we process it. The SUD comes down. And it stalls somewhere around a two or a three, and stays there across sessions, and the client starts to wonder whether they’re doing this wrong, or whether EMDR works for them.

Now ask what happened after the assault. They told someone. A parent, a sibling, a partner. And that person, after showing a swirl of conflicting sublimated emotions, changed the subject, or didn’t believe them, or made it about themselves, or asked what they’d been wearing, or was kind for a week and then never mentioned it again.

The assault is the shadow. The abandonment is closer to the fire.

And I want to be precise about what I’m claiming, because this gets misheard as saying the assault wasn’t the real trauma. That’s not it. The claim is the opposite, and it raises the stakes rather than lowering them: what happened was traumatic, and one reason it may still be organizing this person’s life is that it exploited something they already carried in. It proved a template. It confirmed a thing they’d been braced for since long before that night, or whenever it happened, that when the worst happens they’ll be alone with it. That’s not a smaller injury than the assault. And sometimes, it’s the injury that keeps the assault alive.

Trauma so often gains its organizing power by exploiting an internal working model. A traumatic event doesn’t land on empty ground; it enters an already organized relational world, and its most devastating meaning can come from what it confirms there. The event is where that organization becomes visible: tangible proof that can become a composite representation of every moment like it.

I believe this is why the stall at two or three isn’t a failure. The residue is relational incoherence: how do I hold that this terrible thing happened to me and nobody could stay with me in it? You can’t desensitize your way out of that, and a client who’s been told they should be able to will conclude that either something is wrong with them, or that there’s no hope in EMDR, therapy, or any practice. I’d rather they knew the number stopped where it did for a reason.

The fire is lit again in here

There’s one more turn, and it’s the one this whole publication exists for.

Those organizing expectations aren’t only historical. They’re not sitting in the past waiting to be excavated. They arrive in the room, with you, and they’re at work in the first ten minutes of the first session.

Will you believe me. Will my distress be too much for you. Will you need me to do this correctly. Will you go somewhere else when I get difficult. Will you choose the protocol over what I’m telling you right now.

So this stops being archaeology. We’re not only reconstructing what cast the shadow then; the light is moving in here, now, between us, and it’s throwing something on the wall while we work. That’s what an enactment is. It’s the conditions that made the meaning, running live, in a room where for once somebody can say so out loud.

And that’s the whole argument for working this way. History matters enormously; I’m not proposing we stop going back. But the thing we have been trying to reach through history is also available in the present tense, in the only place any of us can actually intervene.

The part that’s frightening

I don’t want to arrive at that and skip past what the clinician in my consultation group said next, because she was right and she said it better than I would have.

Curious… and scared.

It is a more vulnerable way to work. You’re choosing to be more relationally transparent, more explicit about what’s happening between you, and that’s exposing in both directions. You may be the first person who has ever named this out loud with your client, which is a strange kind of intimacy and not always a welcome one. Some clients respond by understanding, for the first time, what therapy is for. Others find the contrast with the rest of their life unbearable, and the honest ones say so.

This way of working asks something of us. If the light in the room is coming off both people, then some of what lands on that wall is ours; our own templates, our own bracing, our own need for the session to go well. That’s not a reason to avoid the work. It’s a reason to be in our own.

I don’t want to sell this as a technique upgrade. It’s a different relationship to what you’re doing, and it costs more.

What to do with this on Tuesday

Four practices, not a protocol.

Take the history you already take, then stay in the room longer. You found a moment. Before you shape it into a target, camp out in it. Who else was there. Who wasn’t. Who did this get taken to afterward, and what happened when it was. What did this moment prove, and what had already been half-proved before it. The target list you get from that is a different list.

Read the negative cognition as a history rather than a label. When a client lands on I am powerless, treat it as a summary of a thousand confirmations rather than a belief to be swapped. Then ask, genuinely curious, where the confirmations came from. That question tends to open a door the NC list tends to close.

When you’re tempted to float further back, ask which direction you’re going. Backward and inward aren’t the same move. Sometimes the earlier memory is exactly right. Sometimes the more useful question is what relational world made this one mean what it means, and that question doesn’t live earlier. It lives behind, underneath, within.

Let a stall be a story. When a target settles at two or three and won’t move, resist the reflex to call it ecological and move on. Ask what remains relationally incoherent about the event. Often, the answer is a person, and what they did or didn’t do when they were told.

What’s casting it

The prisoners in the cave weren’t foolish. They were doing excellent work on the only thing they could see, and they were rewarded for getting good at it. That’s most of us, most of the time, and the training that got us there was good training, good consultation, a good heart and mind.

But the fire was always behind us, and it was always relational, and nobody has to leave the cave for it to come into view. Someone just has to be willing to turn around, in the dark, with company.

The target isn’t the trauma. It’s one place the trauma became visible.

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The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast. Subscribing is free.

Mentioned: Plato, Republic, Book VII; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974).